Day: 050
Date: Wednesday, 20 July 2022
Start: Hay-on-Wye
Finish: Pandy (then bus to Abergavenny)
Daily Kilometres: 27
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 1399
Weather: Mild and overcast all day.
Accommodation: Hotel
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Pastries/Flapjacks
Lunch: Egg & salad sandwich/Chicken & bacon sandwich
Dinner: Pizza, Raspberry trifle
Aches: Dave - sore right shoulder (see below). Julie - nothing.
Highlight: Eventually getting some views from the top of the Black Mountains after being in thick fog when we first reached the high ridge.
Lowlight: Dave tripped and fell on a relatively easy part of the trail, landing on his right shoulder, which is now giving a lot of discomfort when the arm is moved though it’s OK when walking with the pack on.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
Our destination for the day was the hamlet of Pandy, though the only accommodation we could get was a pub in Abergavenny, a 20-minute bus ride from Pandy. The buses go every two hours, so our goal was to catch the 3:00pm bus and we left Hay-on-Wye at 6:30am to give ourselves every chance.
It was cooler than yesterday as we climbed out of the village, but still quite humid and very hazy with a low cloud base. We started out across fields but soon encountered some steep trail in a wood. By 7:00am, Dave could see the sweat running off the end of his nose like a leaking tap and was wondering where the cooler weather was.
After some easier climbing across moorland and a cooling breeze things looked better, but then we had a really steep and long climb up to Hay Bluff, the last part of which was in thick fog so you could not see how far you still had to go. We just had to keep plugging away knowing that eventually the crest would be reached. We were quite warm when we reached the trig point marking the end of the climb, but a teacher/instructor huddled there in all his warm gear waiting for Duke of Edinburgh students to arrive looked anything but.
The fog was still very thick as we set off along the long plateau-like Hatterrall Ridge and we began to despair of getting any of the great views we knew were there. However, the walking was easy, the temperature good and we just motored along. Coming the other way, we encountered some groups of teenagers on their Duke of Ed expedition (as we did all day), not always looking happy, and not always appropriately dressed.
The cloud base began to lift a little as we followed the ridge and we began to get hazy glimpses of the valleys way below. We had our breakfast break around 9:30am on the broad moorland and quickly cooled down in the fog and breeze, donning our jackets. After breakfast, the breeze dropped and the cloud lifted a little higher giving us better, but still hazy, views. The usual sheep were around on the moor, but we also saw several herds of horses/ponies who seemed little-troubled by hikers and were sometimes hard to get past on the trail.
We continued to make good time, despite Dave tripping and hurting his shoulder (see above), and stopped for our lunch break at 12:30pm near the top of Hatterrall Hill with just over 5 kilometres to go and plenty of time in hand before the 3:00pm bus.
The last leg was mostly downhill and often steep, but we had the bonus of even better views as we dropped further below the cloud base. We reached the bus stop with 30 minutes to spare and then caught it to the market town of Abergavenny where we checked into our hotel at 3:30pm just as it was starting to drizzle.
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